THISISGAME, where Korean games industry news meet you

Archive for: May 2012

G-Star2012, the largest game event in Korea, will be held from the 8th to 11th of November. Korea Association of Game Industry announced the detail of G-Star2012 at ITS GAME 2012 in Seoul, Korea on the 30th.

The host for G-Star has changed from KOCCA(Korea Creative Content Agency) to Korea Association of Game Industry, which is a private organization from this year. Since it is hosted by a private organization, all regulations regarding the game show will be decided by game companies itself. G-Star has had several issues to solve such as too much noise, long waiting lines, too much exposure of promotion girls etc. These issues will be solved by discussing with game companies themselves.

Small venues have been expanded as well. Bexco now have the 2nd exhibition hall that is completed on the 29th of May. B2B area will be located at it separated from B2C area and will provide more quite business environment. With the completion of the 2nd hall, the whole Bexco building will be used for B2C. B2C and B2B areas are connected by a bridge. Bexco auditorium, which has 4,000 seats, has been completed as well for various purposes.

If you plan to have a booth, you should register before the 17th of July to get a 10% early bird discount fare. If you had a booth last year, you can get an additional 10% discount.

Diablo3 fever hits Korea high since launching. The question is how long it will be? We asked it to 230 industry people. They consist of developers and business men.
About 90% of the participants answer that Diablo3 is succeeded beyond their prediction. Business people surprised 6.6% more than developers.

The result of Diablo3’s success was expected or more than expected, 89.5%

About how long Diablo3 fever will go, 30% predicted that it will go until June while 17% answers until the next year. Business people predicted it will be getting cold any time soon, while developers predicted it will go until the summer vacation. Participants who did not play Diablo3 predicted more that it won’t last long than participants who play it.

Could Diablo3 keep providing new contents often?

More than the half of participants chose the lack of contents as the main reason people will quit to play Diablo3 because it is a package game not an online game.

After Diablo3 fever becomes stable at PC Bang, 41.8% participants predicted PC Bang occupying rate of Diablo3 will be over 16%, which could be #1 at PC Bang. 18.7% answers it will be between 11~15%, which could be top5 at PC Bang.

Many issues has been made since Diablo3 is launched throughout the world – Korea is not an exception. Because Blizzard Korea announced that they prepare the enough number of the collector’s edition for the launching event and everyone could buy one or two, 5,000 fans who stayed overnight to buy the collector’s edition in Seoul on the 14th of May. However, the truth is they prepared 2,000 copies only because they estimated 1,000 people will join the event. Fans got angry enough even before they meet error 37.

Dominating at PC Bang Ranking
According to the data from Gametrics, a professional Korean PC Bang statistics provider, Diablo3 occupied 28.93% of total PC Bang occupancy rate from the 15th to 21st of May. After the server became a bit stable on 21st, the rate went straight up to 38.75%. There has been only 1 game that the rate goes up over 30% – Starcraft.

League of Legends(LOL) was #1 in Korea with 20.70% before Diablo3 launching, however the rate went down to 13.65%. (On 24th of May, Diablo3 rate 39.41% / LOL rate 11.57%) Not only LOL rate went down, but also the rates of all games within top 10 before Diablo3 launching went down.
Because of the lousy launching event, people who have not involved with any game experiences before shows interests toward Diablo3 include KPOP stars, politicians etc.

Most Korean developers and publishers pretended not paying attention to Diablo3, their actual thinking seems ‘Let’s avoid Diablo3’ now. In fact, there was no Korean online game companies announce CBT, OBT around the 15th of May. We are not sure whether Diablo3 made most Korean online game companies’ share prices down recently or economic crises in Europe did, but it is true that share prices of Korean online game companies went down.
We are not sure how long Diablo3’s domination is continuing in Korea. But if it goes long enough, many Korean online games will be affected by Diablo3.

Owners of PC-Bang (Cybercafe) sue Nexon for making a loss by doing unfair corporate practices and one-man protest at the in front of Nexon Korea building and major political party buildings. They plan for damage claim suit near future as well. Nexon contradicts their argument.

The group of PC-Bang owners called Korea Internet Cultural Content Cooperation reports Nexon’s unfair corporate practices to Fair Trade Commission on the 22nd of May.

The corporation insists that Nexon did not act properly for the issue that their games often keep charging even after games are shut down. In addition, Nexon is providing games as a PC-Bang package to PC-Bang, which unpopular games are included forcibly. They report that Nexon did not allow connecting their games from PC-Bang that does not buy their PC-Bang products as well. Most Nexon games are free to play at home, but only PC-Bang owners get charged in Korea.

Nexon Korea argues with each of their insistence. Nexon reports that there is almost no calculation errors happening now. Even if it is happened, Nexon immediately compensate it 3 times of the overcharged amount to PC-Bang.

About making PC-Bang to purchase the premium PC-Bang package, Nexon said “It is a part the company’s operating field. All issues from the cooperation have been told for a long time and nothing is new. We doubt any other purposes they might have by issuing them again now.”

Nexon is looking for Asian online game publishers to acquire. The company delivered acquisition proposal to P.T.Kreon, #1 publisher in Indonesia, last year.

The Recent news that Nexon acquires more than 30% shares of Gamania, #1 publisher in Taiwan, and becomes the largest shareholder was shocked many people as well. Taiwan game industry was shocked because of it and worried about hostile takeover y Nexon. Gamania has built a long-term partnership with Nexon and published several online games such as Maple Story, Dungeon&Fighters, KartRider etc.

Nexon started having a cooperated relationship with Gamania from 2005 and acquired 10% shares from Gamania in 2007. Nexon has 34.6% of Gamania’s shares, which is more than the total sum of Gamania CEO Albert Ryu’s and its executives’ shares.

It is possible that the issue could be cleared at Gamania’s general meeting of stockholders in June. Since Nexon is listed on Japanese stock market, they become sensitive to keep growth and raise the profit rate.